Anticipating Defeat, Broward Cancels Vote on Bonds

School officials in Broward County, Fla., pulled a bond referendum
from the November ballot last week rather than see it fail at the
polls.

In place of the proposed $800 million bond issue, the rapidly
growing school district plans to borrow about $350 million this
summer to pay for repairs at its older schools and to ease
overcrowding. District officials said they will wait until 1998
before asking voters to approve the remaining $450 million in
bonds.

The extra year will give the 217,000-student district time to
rebuild the confidence of skeptical parents and taxpayers, some of whom
are still smarting from promises they say were not kept after a 1987
bond issue.

The delay will also put distance between the school system and its
current legal entanglements. The U.S. Attorney's office for the
southern district of Florida, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the
Internal Revenue Service are investigating alleged corruption and
mismanagement in the district's construction program. And local
prosecutors convened a grand jury last week as part of a similar
probe.

School board Chairman Abraham Fischler said last week that the extra
year will give the district time to show that "we can [run a
construction program] and be more responsive, and that will give the
public more confidence in supporting a bond issue."

Mr. Fischler and Superintendent Frank Petruzielo, who came to the
district in 1995, contend that the problems making headlines this
spring have been corrected.

"We're still cleaning up spilt milk," the superintendent
acknowledged, but "there have been significant policy changes that have
totally restructured the way we are doing business."

Faster Action

School officials said raising the initial money from loans that
don't require voter approval will let the district move sooner on its
most critical needs, including renovation and replacement of old
schools in rundown areas.

Mr. Petruzielo said he came up with the two-part plan two weeks ago
after concluding that the Florida legislature would not give districts
any more taxing authority this year.

District officials point to a $1.4 billion gap between the system's
$2.4 billion construction needs over the next five years and what it
can raise through property taxes and its share of a state fund for
school construction. A 1995 effort add a penny to the local sales tax
was soundly rejected by voters.

"I don't know if there is any other district in as bad a set of
circumstances for overcrowding as we are," Mr. Petruzielo said.

Every year for the next seven, the district expects to gain 10,000
new students.

Neil Sterling, who heads a local political-action committee that
will stump for the 1998 bond proposal, praised the new plan "as making
all the sense in the world."

But Charlotte Greenbarg, a longtime critic of the school system and
the chairwoman of a state watchdog group, said she didn't believe the
delaying tactics would work: "What is going to make people who are
inept and corrupted credible?"